Aimee Stephens, Plaintiff in Transgender Case, Dies at 59

Ms. Stephens was fired from her job after she announced that she would live as a woman. Her complaint is now before the Supreme Court.

Aimee Stephens outside her childhood home in Fayetteville, N.C., in 2018. She was fired from her job in 2013 after she told her colleagues that she would begin living as a woman.Credit...Eamon Queeney for The New York Times

Aimee Stephens, whose potentially groundbreaking case before the Supreme Court could have major implications for the fight for civil rights for transgender people, died on Tuesday at her home in Redford, Mich., outside Detroit. She was 59.

The cause was complications of kidney failure, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Ms. Stephens. She had been on dialysis for some time and entered hospice care in late April, the A.C.L.U. said.

Ms. Stephens, a former funeral director in suburban Detroit, was fired from her job in 2013 after she announced to her colleagues in a letter that she would begin living as a woman.

“What I must tell you is very difficult for me and is taking all the courage I can muster,” she wrote. “I have felt imprisoned in a body that does not match my mind, and this has caused me great despair and loneliness.”

The letter continued: “I will return to work as my true self, Aimee Australia Stephens, in appropriate business attire. I hope we can continue my work at R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes doing what I always have, which is my best!”

Two weeks after receiving the letter, the funeral homes’ owner, Thomas Rost, fired Ms. Stephens. Asked in court for the “specific reason that you terminated Stephens,” Mr. Rost said: “Well, because he was no longer going to represent himself as a man. He wanted to dress as a woman.”

Ms. Stephens filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which sued the funeral homes, saying her employer had violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But a district court ruled in the employer’s favor. Ms. Stephens then won in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati.

That decision was challenged by the funeral home, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative nonprofit group, and in April 2019 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on the question of whether the Civil Rights Act protects transgender people from workplace discrimination.

The case is one of three now before the court that are expected to provide the first indications of how its new conservative majority will approach L.G.B.T. rights.

The National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy group, said it expected a decision by the court “perhaps as soon as Thursday.”

Ms. Stephens traveled to Washington for the Supreme Court hearing on the case in October. She said at the time that she was overwhelmed by the number of people demonstrating on her behalf.

“To hear them outside of the courthouse steps chanting my name, telling me that they loved me, that has a big effect on you,” she said in a video published by the A.C.L.U. “The more I’ve seen the support, it gives me the strength to get up another day, to go on fighting another day and give that same hope to all the rest.”

Ms. Stephens was born on Dec. 7, 1960, in Fayetteville, N.C. She graduated from Mars Hill University in 1984 with a degree in religious education and obtained a degree in mortuary science from Fayetteville Technical Community College in 1988, according to the A.C.L.U. She started working at R.G. & G.R. Harris in 2008.

Ms. Stephens’s survivors include her wife, Donna Stephens, and the couple’s daughter, Elizabeth.

Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, called Ms. Stephens “a hero in the fight for equal rights for all people.”

“Aimee was fired for being transgender, and she chose to stand up for herself and for all transgender people,” she said.

Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said Ms. Stephens “will be remembered as a trailblazer.”

“All of us in the L.G.B.T.Q. community owe her immense gratitude for her bravery in standing up for the right of L.G.B.T.Q. people to live as ourselves at work and in every aspect of our lives,” he said in a statement.